The micro element of this trauma and drama is a molehill of an issue with Best Buy absurdly turning into a mountain that is behind a call to boycott that company that has a virtually stranglehold on the US brick-and-mortar market for electronics.
The Best Buy media-relations department did not respond to several calls to discuss this article.
The macro view is that new Best Buy CEO Corie Barry and her fellow new breed of "suits," including Kevin Johnson of Starbucks, have rewarded customers who have helped the companies that provide them multi-million dollar compensation packages by completely throwing them under the Geek Squad van.
The straw that becomes a major pain below the back of your not-so-humble reviewer is addressed below. It comes a few months after figuratively telling Johnson, who has willfully turned a callous blind eye to his public, where he can pour his grossly over-priced (and more-often-than-not improperly prepared) beverages. (I have saved $100s and lost a few pounds in the interim.)
Even more spot on, a pledge to never contribute another cent to the income of Barry and her fellow equally insulated executives comes a month after reading a New York Tines article illustrating how corporations determine the point at which customers jump ship and how those models of capitalism come perilously close to crossing it. A cited example is a cell-phone service provider waiting until a long-time customer cancels her service before providing an incentive to not switch carriers.
Suffice it to say that I have been a very profitable customer of Best Buy for more than a decade.
BACKGROUND
Before sharing the tale of woe behind this radical move, I want to state that I have communicated it many times to people at Best Buy in telephone messages, e-mails, and even tweets to Barry (@Corie_Barry). Barry has not acknowledged these communications in any form.
The other efforts to have my concerns heard either were similarly ignored or directed to the senior customer-service rep., who has become far more of the problem than the solution. He continues taunting me as to he being the only one whom Best Buy will have address my concerns. Team Barry has ample notice of this.
This all began a few Saturdays ago when I went to a Best Buy to buy a wireless doorbell. The employee who helped me asserted that she was trained in that area. Both the outcome and a subsequent discussion with a store manager proved that that was not the case.
The next morning, I followed my Sunday routine of checking the Best Buy website for the weekly specials. I learned that the company was running a promotion in the form of giving away an Amazon Echo Dot (a.k.a. Alexa) with the purchase of the basic Ring doorbell that I had purchased. I also saw that that promotion was ending that day.
Experience during the reign of CEO (now Executive Chairman) Hubert Joly inspired confidence that Best Buy executive service quickly would make all things right with the world. I copied and pasted the product page (which included the offer) and mailed it to myself for good measure. I will add that no one has acknowledged an e-mail to Joly.
On calling executive customer service, I got the aforementioned rep. He was unresponsive from the start and stated that I could have forged the e-mailed copied-and-pasted product page from the Best Buy site.
The rest of this story was that the issue of the rep. was that I did not include a weblink in the e-mail with the product-page that I sent him. I responded that accessing a link on Monday would not document an offer that expired the prior day. The rep. responded that the link would reflect the expired deal because it would go to my computer. He would not acknowledge that that was inaccurate.
I then asked to speak to the supervisor of the rep. The rep. refused that request, stating that he was the only Best Buy employee to whom I ever would speak.
I then called the store where i bought the doorbell; an hour later, the store acknowledged the validity of the offer and pledged to send an Alexa. They did so later that day.
I called executive customer service back to report the development with the store. I got a different rep. than the first one. He told me that he would have his supervisor call me back; that never occurred. That rep. also stated that the first rep. easily could have looked up the offer that had expired the prior day.
The second rep, promised to confirm the offer and call me back; he never called back.
The first exec. rep. with whom I spoke called back two hours later and stated that the offer was to buy a doorbell that was $100 more than the one that I bought to get the free Alexa, which had gone down from $50 to $25 since Sunday. In other words, his solution was to spend $75 more than I needed to in order to get a free $25 item to which I had an undisputed right.
This time, the rep. seemed unable to grasp that the offer that existed on Monday differed from that of the day before. He again refused to have his supervisor get involved. I hung up.
All this led to the extensive aforementioned efforts to get someone at Best Buy to address both my frustration and the deplorable manner in which the first rep. handled the matter; the futility as to that led to this article.
My "demands" are a meaningful conversation with the VP of customer service for Best Buy, an equally substantive acknowledgment of the offer and the poor job of the first rep., and credible assurance that Best Buy will reasonably act in the future to put right what once went wrong.
Armchair Management
Cutting back on customer service is understandable; murdering it is not.
Easy solutions for funding better service include a little pain "today" in the form of cutting the pay of anyone earning more than $100,000 by one-percent in exchange for an additional personal day each year to avoid having to eliminate their position "tomorrow."
Corporations also could expand tele-commuting programs by offering that option in exchange for offering eligible employees that option in exchange for a five-percent pay reduction.
On top of this, Barry and her fellow CEOs could make the gesture of a 5% pay cut to help their companies remain viable,
Epilogue
I likely have saved $100 in impulse purchases by not shopping at Best Buy or looking at its website in the past month. Unless and until things change, I further expect that I will save countless hours and massive levels of stress not fighting when the inevitable molehills surface.
I will splurge on a special treat if and when Best Buy announces a need to close numerous stores due to poor sales.
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